On Inbound Poaching
If you hire great people and do great work, your startup will be a target for poaching by BigCos, by your customers, and by pesky recruiters. It’s a natural part of business. Luckily, the same things that make your startup a target for poaching make it hard for your people to want to go. It’s hard to leave a dynamic startup with great people and great work to be a routine employee at a BigCo.
In particular, it’s hard for software developers to leave a software-centric company to go to a BigCo where software is treated as a side show to the company’s primary business.
Culture is critical and a great startup culture leads to happy (i.e. poach-resistant) employees.
If an employee decides to be poached, it is probably for the best. Whatever made them susceptible to poaching in the first place probably means something was not matched up well between the startup and the employee.
Partner Poaching
Sometimes a partner or recruiter specifically targets a particular startup. A few years ago, one of the major chip developer BigCos targeted our people. Nearly every engineer received the same poaching email. Someone in BigCo’s HR department had the bright idea. None of our people left in response. When I found out, I sent an email to our point of contact within the BigCo saying this was unacceptable and would damage our working relationship. In turn, our point of contact sent the HR department a strong memo to cut it out. They no longer target our people any differently than they target the rest of the world.
Customer Poaching
If a customer tries to poach, it’s an interesting situation. My immediate reaction is to fire the customer. They are violating non-solicitation agreements and general good-faith business. A customer poaching situation is one in which the customer and the poached employee are trying to cut out the middle man (i.e. the startup) that did all the work to generate the business in the first place.
If found and stopped early enough, the company and the unsuccessfully-poached employee have the new-found knowledge that the customer is willing to invest more money to get a solution to its problems. Additional sales can potentially be spun out of customer poaching situations.
One AccelerEyes person was once offered $300,000 by one of our customers to leave AccelerEyes. The customer had dire problems and needed solutions. It’s wasn’t long until the customer went belly up. It’s good the AccelerEyes person did not take the bait.
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I’ve written before about how there are many advantages to working at a startup over a BigCo. I believe that our people, especially the ones that grow with the company and become part of us deep down, will make more compensation and experience more personally enriching opportunities here than are available elsewhere in our market or easily found anywhere.
Good compensation (in all of its forms) is important to prevent poaching and startups need to craft compensation packages that reward everyone in the business fairly and give the startup the best opportunity for growth. Good compensation coupled with the other advantages of startup life are sufficient to thwart poaching in the cases where it is needed most.
Today was about defense. Tomorrow will be about offense: On Outbound Poaching.
What are your thoughts on poaching?